Digitally represented graphics, such as computer graphics, is continuously improving in performance. In the 1980's and 1990's, display adapters for computers and game consoles appeared with graphics accelerators, offloading the Central Processing Unit (CPU) in graphics generation. Initially, the display adapters offered acceleration of 2D graphics, but eventually these also included support for accelerated 3D graphics. Modern display adapters use a processing unit often named a graphics processing unit (GPU).
Due to the complexity of 3D graphics, GPU:s of today use a significant amount of their processing power to perform calculations related to 3D graphics.
A continuous problem with display adapters is performance. There are always new applications and games requiring higher frame rates (rendered screen images per second), higher resolutions and higher image quality, resulting in requirements that each screen image should be rendered in a short a time as possible. In other words, it is always important to increase performance.
One way known to increase performance is to increase the processing power of the GPU:s by enabling higher clock speeds, pipelining, or exploiting parallel computations. However, this often generates more heat, resulting in more power consumption and higher fan noise for cooling the GPU. Power consumption and heat is a major constraint and bottleneck for mobile devices. Moreover, there are limits to the clock speeds of each GPU.
Consequently, there is still a problem with insufficient abilities to improve performance in digitally represented graphics.